Song du Jour: "Who's Your Baby Now?"

John Swardson, "Who's Your Baby Now?"

I only heard this once, live, and I'm not even sure this is the title, but it's with me a week later. Swardson is the son of the great writer/thinker/crank Roger Swardson, who died three Thanksgiving mornings ago. That loss, all loss, is in John's voice on this one, a song-question to an ex, posed in a way only song-questions can be.

That's because song-questions are wholly illogical and ill-advised, posed as they are to phantoms-demons of the mind and heart. Rosanne Cash asked her invisible ex-would-be-suitor, "Who does your past belong to tonight?" Karen Casey simply blurted to the universe, "Where are you tonight, I wonder?" Woody Guthrie/Billy Bragg gave it up to their ghosts, "Do you ever think of me my darling, as you sail that ocean blue?" Liz Phair cried, "Why can't I breathe whenever I think about you?" Peter Perrett pined, "Sometimes I think of you, out there in the night/Roaming the empty streets, looking for your life."

With a low growl that suggests cigarettes not pillow mints; curiousity not jealousy, Swardson imagines the unimaginable and asks the unanswerable, though it's clear he wants anything but the whole truth. Do you call someone else "baby?" Do you do what we did? Do you use the same lines on him you did on me? Do you rest your head on his chest? Who does your past belong to tonight?